


a litany of falsehoods

by lesbianbirds



Series: character studies [3]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Anger, Character Study, F/F, uhh what can i tag! pretty much nothing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-22
Updated: 2020-12-22
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:47:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28236426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesbianbirds/pseuds/lesbianbirds
Summary: Melanie used to say that she kept all her anger in her lungs.
Relationships: Georgie Barker/Melanie King, Melanie King & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Series: character studies [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1965208
Comments: 5
Kudos: 18





	a litany of falsehoods

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this in one sitting at around 1am and the only reason this is faintly coherent is because of my amazing beta @drumkonwords, who is honestly just amazing! 
> 
> warnings: brief allusion to self-harm

Melanie played the flute all throughout high school. She knew her Gs from her F sharps, could play the Pink Panther theme with her eyes closed because her dad liked it and the Star Wars theme because could never quite whistle it. But then she got trapped in that fucking Institute, so her old flute sat gathering dust until she finally got the guts to sell it. 

She’s not sure if she’d be able to stand playing it again these days, if her fingers would move over the keys in the same ways, if the music would pull at her in the same way. But that’s beside the point, beside the story she’s taken to crafting. Music is all wrapped in the Slaughter you see, all wrapped up in the drip of blood and the tug at her lungs. Wrapped around her hands, the fragility of the bones and the places where she dug the knife in. 

Music is a tug in her blood, a quiet demand to join the choir and learn to dance and sing and move, and she loves it, of course she loves it. It is all she had during high school, when she was getting ugly haircuts and learning to take deep breathes and bury all her anger where nobody can find it. 

Not that it works. But she tries, just like she tried to learn how to ride and a bike and tried to learn how to build a campfire and tried to learn where the line is between being loved and being consumed. 

She took flute lessons in a group, you see, her and two other kids. Only one of them really stood out in her memory, bathed in the fluorescent lighting of the music room.

A girl, of course. Long hair, long fingers that moved across the keys so quickly you could barely see them, so quickly that to see her hold a note was a revelation. Melanie can still remember the shade of her pursed lips, the way she always squeaked on high notes. Melanie never quite feels the same kind of wonderment as she gets when she's watching her play, copying her clumsily and getting better every time. She can only remember bits of how the girl had looked; hair, nose, ear, laugh. 

Melanie tends to squeak on the high notes too. 

When she first got into making videos, all the scary moments were overlaid with flute music, all the descriptions of sudden, shocking violence and the ghosts left in the wake of it. Flute music is atmospheric, high and keening. 

There’s nothing musical about the noise in her head after the Flesh attacks, but she thinks that if she ever composed music she could make a passable song out of it. Clashing cymbals maybe, high pipe music so shrill it made you grit your teeth and shout to drown it out.

*

While Jon was sitting in his office and pretending that he had the right to dig through her leg, pretend he knew anything about how it felt to be human, like he knew what it felt like to be scared when he wasn’t  _ there _ , she reads up on Slaughter statements. She  _ thinks _ they’re Slaughter statements anyway, but the words bleed together in front of her eyes some days, and flesh is flesh and violence is violence even if you talk about predator and prey or the endless fear of being consumed. 

Melanie doesn’t quite know what to do with herself anymore, because her throat is raw and the only fire burning in her veins is the justified kind.

Her anger consumed her until it wasn’t hers anymore, but now she can tuck it close to her chest and revel in the fact that it is hers and only hers. Melanie will never quite fall out of love with the sting of anger in her veins, the way it straightens her back and gives strength to her voice. But she is not a house on fire, she is not consumed completely, she is some angel with a flaming sword, she is some girl with bruised knees and a raised voice. She is not burning. She is not dancing or fighting or dying. 

There was nothing about that anger that made her stronger. It just made her scared and shaking from the taste of it in her mouth, the suddenness of it, sharp and metallic on her tongue. 

So Melanie sits on the stupid Institute’s crappy plastic chairs and reads until she feels the sickness in her stomach that means that something has become unmoored. She reads until the words seem to come from the under end of a long tunnel, and it’s stupid because Jon already went through these and it’s stupid because she can’t really feel the paper underneath her hands anymore. 

The Slaughter is senseless, she learns. This is a key difference between her and it, so she defines herself by it. Takes ten deep breaths, evaluates if she should be angry at it or not, and then draws on that sting in her blood. 

*

Before the apocalypse they have a brief time of happiness, set in stone as a period of time because of the tragedies that bracket it like some form of morbid bookends. Melanie memorises Georgie’s voice during that time, and the feel of the Admiral’s fur, and the parts of Star Wars that Georgie likes best. She can’t play the theme song anymore, but she can act out some of the scenes with exaggerated voices, pulling faces until Georgie tries to kiss her despite her laughter. 

Melanie learns that Georgie has a love for slasher films, which she can’t stomach anymore, and sappy poetry, which makes her smile uncontrollably. She learns that during the time when everything was washed out and grey Georgie developed a taste for poetry. She devoured it like it was the only thing that mattered when she started getting emotions back. These days she just recites half-remembered snippets as she waits for the pie to come out of the oven, a smile on her lips that Melanie wants to kiss.

Her father hadn’t much of a taste for poetry, but he liked lyrical prose and the harsh violence of action films. Melanie had grown up on Tarintino and old westerns, and she isn’t sure if she liked them much but she is sure of how if you put blood in the right lighting it can seem like something beautiful. A framework, a gratuitous excuse for something or another, a gentle call to join the choir, to give into the song that tugs at her blood and makes her want to sing. Red blood on white car seats. Red blood staining hands and lips and arms.

When she helps Georgie edit the latest episode of What The Ghost, she makes sure to put in heavy organ music instead, jarring in it's loudness. 

Afterwards she tries on different melodies, hums half-forgotten lullabies to Georgie in bed, presses her hands to her ribs and contents herself with the reminder that she is breathing. In and out, deep and even like her flute instructor taught her all those years ago. Use your diaphragm to make sure the sound is pure and simple and can be heard all throughout the room . 

Georgie tends to hold her wrist in a strange grip when they fall asleep, fingers resting on her pulse point. When Melanie points out that it’s better to check at the neck to make sure that she doesn’t get their pulses confused Georgie laughs and kisses her with chocolate still at the corner of her mouth, so Melanie gets used to holding her hand at an awkward angle. 

*

Melanie used to go camping with her dad, which can’t be that different than hiding in the tunnels of her old workplace. 

It’s not that bad, considering the situations she’s been in before and considering that she could be running a domain herself, and she has Georgie. 

When she was a young teenager still finding her voice, she’d used to crawl into his bed in the late hours of the night, when it was either that or start holding matches to her skin like it’ll purify her. He never minded much, even when she complained about his snoring, or when she needed to talk and talk until her breathing was steady and her hands stopped shaking. 

There’s a man in the tunnels who is patient with all the children no matter how much they scream and cry, who tells her in a quiet voice when they fall asleep that he isn’t sure where his own are. There is a woman who doesn’t know if her face is her own, who presses her fingers to her nose and the delicate skin of her eyelids like she doesn’t believe they’re real, that they're hers and not stolen or gifted or just paper over bone, flimsy as a two dollar mask. 

Melanie tries not to think of Tim Stoker and his shaking hands and his desperate pleas to tell her who he was mourning for. She tries not to think at all, just runs her hand through the Admiral’s fur and listens to Georgie stumble over poetry she’s mostly forgotten and doesn’t talk much, not unless it’s about Jonah Magnus and what he’ll sound like dying. 

She avoids people who have crawled out of domains of senseless violence and relentless, pulsing music. She avoids people who reminded her of the Flesh attack where she’d defended like there was pattern to her movements other than the discordant dance steps she’d never meant to learn.

*

When Jon turns everything back she sits with him on the curbside and talks of what it’s like to see yourself in monster’s faces. She invites him to bake with her one day, to make something out of water and flour and old recipes. 

Georgie makes her dinner that night and laughs while baking bread that doesn’t taste like something a monster would like. It’s strange, to sit in their old apartment that isn’t quite the same anymore and pretend they’re okay. 

But Georgie sits with her and holds her hand, pressing kisses to every knuckle on her hands and whispering things Melanie can’t quite make out. 

*

If Melanie was inclined to writing apologies her hands would be aching, so instead she drags them out bit by bit like it hurts her. She never was good at saying sorry, because half the time she was apologising for someone else and the other half she was still burning up with anger. Burning was the only word for it after all, something that starts in her lungs and spills out of her lips like cigarette smoke. Leaves the same taste too, like when she’d had her first smoke and hadn’t inhaled properly, a tight feeling in her chest and a bad taste on her tongue. 

Melanie knows anger like she knows the back of her hands, like she knows the rhythm of her breathing when she runs and the exact shade of her blood. She knows how it boils and rises to her fingertips. It’s hers after all, like the campfire her dad taught her to make, warm, controlled and useful. So she takes a deep breath in and-

And then she’s scrabbling on the floor, hands flexing and grabbing and not saving her, breathing harsh and shallow. There’s a scream caught at the base of her throat and a pain in her leg like she was being consumed by some great beast which had sunk its teeth into her.

Maybe it would have been easier if she had died, if she didn’t close her eyes and see the afterimage of flesh and hatred playing on the back of her eyelids like those arthouse films Martin likes. 

She asked Jon what it was like to be missing two ribs, just after she’d seen the yellow door swing close. He said he wasn’t human enough for it to matter with a self-conscious smile, one arm half wrapped around him like he had a stomach ache. Melanie tried not to think about how unprotected his heart must be. She tries not to think about how Georgie spreads her hands on Melanie’s ribs like she’s overing an armour of sorts, a refuge made of flesh and bone and love. 

Her leg didn’t hurt much anymore. There’s a scar under her fingers when she runs them down her calf though, so she takes to wearing long skirts. Starts messing around with braiding her hair and contouring her face so it looks more masculine. Learns how to say  _ lesbian  _ like it means something. Learns poetry and baking and the feeling of Jon’s hand in hers and the exact tone of Georgie’s laugh. Learns how to shout and scrabble and bandage her bruised knees. 

Learns how to be herself, building herself up bit by bit from all the beautiful parts of herself, sappy love poetry and lullabies and the kind of anger that makes sure she’s listened to. 

Melanie King is angry. Melanie King is beautiful and kind and alive. 

**Author's Note:**

> come talk to me over on tumblr at lesbianbirds, or on my writing blog plasticbaubles!


End file.
